All multimedia communication protocols involve transmission of media streams (audio/video streams); and it is more suitable to use UDP protocol for transmission of media streams in IP networks. Therefore, presently, most of the multimedia communication protocols employ UDP to carry media streams. However, as UDP is a non-connection-oriented transport layer protocol, Network Address Translation (NAT) devices are unable to determine which private network the incoming UDP packets should be forwarded to; as a result, UDP packets transmitted from a public network to a private network will be rejected by the NAT devices, resulting in the final fail of multimedia communication.
The modes for address translation of NAT device can be classified into: static NAT, dynamic NAT, and NAPT (Network Address Port Translation). At present, solutions for traversal of multimedia communication protocol through NAT in either of the first two NAT modes described above are available: static NAT solution and dynamic NAT solution.
The static NAT solution is implemented as follows: The private network IP addresses of terminals requesting for multimedia communication are mapped to public network IP addresses at NAT, that is, NAT reserves public network IP addresses for the multimedia terminals in private networks in advance.
Based on the static NAT solution, a dynamic NAT solution is introduced: when there is multimedia communication (detected at a known port, for example, the calling known port for H.323 protocol is 1720), NAT assigns a certain public network IP address to the multimedia terminal in the private network dynamically, till the multimedia communication is terminated. Though this solution has been improved compared with the static NAT solution, it is still impossible to save IP address resources in public networks. This is because once a certain public network IP address is assigned to a certain private network terminal, other terminals cannot use this public network IP address before the multimedia communication of this terminal is terminated.
However, for NAPT mode, there is still no solution for traversal of multimedia communication protocol through NAT. NAT devices are designed to save public network IP address resources. But it is impossible for a public network IP address to be shared by multiple multimedia communication terminals in a private network in the existing solutions. In many cases involving private network terminals (or other H.323 nodes), waste of public network IP addresses is inevitable, causing the major function of NAT devices—saving public network IP addresses—to be meaningless in multimedia applications.